Dec. 23, 2016
By ANNA PITINGOLO, GoPSUsports.com Student Staff Writer
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. - Like many college basketball players, Teniya Page was introduced to the sport at a young age. She picked up a basketball when she was in kindergarten, and immediately began working on her skills.
"I started off with a lot of drills around kindergarten," Page said. "I wasn't allowed to play organized basketball until about fourth and fifth grade because my dad thought starting when I was five or six years old would take the fun away immediately."
But unlike other college players, her inspiration to start playing didn't come from watching any of the greats play; it came from watching "Love and Basketball".
"[Teniya] was probably about eight and in the fourth grade and 'Love and Basketball' was my wife's favorite movie so she constantly watched it," said Page's father, Demon. "Maybe the main character kind of stuck with her, so that was when she entertained the idea of playing basketball."
From the start, Page was playing against boys in her hometown of Chicago, and it's where she first got a taste of the speed she was going to need to play down the line.
"I used to play in a bunch of park leagues at home and they were mostly all boys leagues," Page said. "It was challenging at first and I wasn't fast enough so I basically relied on footwork and stuff like that to score. And then once I settled in, I was pretty good at it, especially playing against the boys."
She continued to play with the guys through middle school, and credits those years with making her a faster and better player.
Now in her sophomore season at Penn State, Page is coming off a dominant freshman campaign in which she broke into the top-10 of numerous Lady Lion freshman records and received various accolades.
She's ranked number one on the Penn State freshmen all-time leaderboard in minutes per game with 37.6, fourth in three-point percentage (.409) and fifth in scoring average (15.3). At the end of season, she was selected Second Team All-Big Ten by the coaches, Honorable Mention All-Big Ten by the media, and was a unanimous pick for the Big Ten All-Freshman Team.
This year, Page has picked up right where she left off. She leads the team with 19.8 points per game and total points with 237 - almost 100 points more than second-ranked Lindsey Spann.
"She's very passionate about her knowledge, her basketball IQ, getting better, improving, and I think you see such a big jump from her high school to her freshman year to now her sophomore year and how much better she's become, how much better she makes the players around her," said assistant coach Tamika Jeter.
Basketball wasn't the only sport that attracted Page's attention. She played softball too, and initially liked it more.
"I like softball a lot more than basketball in the beginning," Page said. "But then I realized, not that I would be better at basketball, but that I didn't really like the outdoors like that, especially when it came to having to hit in the fall when it was really cold, so that's kind of why I ended up sticking with basketball."
She played softball for about three years and by the time she was in her early teens she shifted her focus to just basketball. That was when she got serious about one day playing collegiate hoops.
When Page first started high school, she wasn't highly recruited. The first time she went to USA Basketball trials in 2013 was a reality check for her; having thought she was one of the better players, she quickly saw that she had a long way to go.
"No one really knew who I was from Team USA the first time I went," Page said. "It was a big shock for me because, here I had thought I was kind of good and then when I went there it showed me that I really wasn't anywhere near the rest of the girls that were playing."
The second time she went to trials in 2014, a lot more people recognized her because of her time with her AAU team, Midwest Elite. That was when her recruitment really picked up.
Her first Big Ten offer came from Michigan State, but it was a call from Lady Lion head coach Coquese Washington that changed everything for Page.
"We had seen [Coach Washington] just from watching basketball on TV, the way she carried herself on the sideline and her demeanor, that was the thing for us," Demon Page said. "And she did it a little bit different from the way everyone else recruited Teniya because it was just really between her and Teniya."
"I'll never forget, we had just left a game, we were in the car and Coquese called and first she asked if it was okay to recruit Teniya and then she asked Teniya if she would have a problem with her recruiting her. Everybody else, the assistant coach would call you and you'd talk to the assistants before you actually talk to the head coach."
When she took her unofficial visit to Penn State, Page loved everything about the school, program and campus.
Since arriving in 2015, Page hasn't seen her game changed too drastically, but her relationship with the coaching staff has grown stronger, and she says that has helped her to become a better all-around player.
With the Lady Lions sitting at 10-2 on the season, Page has already earned three Big Ten Player of the Week honors and recorded two 30-point games. But she isn't interesting in any personal praise she receives.
"I don't really think about personal goals at all," Page said. "I've always been a team player since the beginning. Even if I didn't score and we win, I'd still be proud and happy with the team. So I'm not really an individual goals person anyway."
Despite her dislike of personal honors and achievements, the Lady Lions will continue to rely on Page's hot shooting moving forward. After the holiday break, Penn State will open Big Ten play against Indiana at the Bryce Jordan Center on Wednesday, Dec. 28.